Mad River

it go. When I heard she’d been shot . . . I couldn’t believe it.”
    “You should have gone to the sheriff,” Virgil said.
    “Duke?” White made a half-choking sound, something like a laugh. “If I’d gone to Duke, he’d of slapped my ass in jail so fast . . . and I’d still be there. The likes of me, I’d never get a break from the likes of him. The thing is . . . Dick never asked me. Never came up again.”
    “But you think he had Ag murdered. That’s what you really think,” Virgil said.
    Another pull at the bottle. “Yeah. That’s what I think. But he never said anything direct.”
    They sat looking at the creek for a minute, then Virgil stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. “You take care,” he said.
    “That’s it?” White asked. “Take care?”
    “I might need you as a witness someday. If that happens, I’ll expect you to tell the same story you told here. But maybe it won’t happen. In that case . . .”
    “He’ll get away with it.”
    “Does that bother you?”
    “Yeah, it does,” White said. “A lot. I don’t know why. I’ve always . . . kicked a little ass myself. Never ran from a fight. But Ag, she was a nice girl. She never needed no little cocksucker like Jimmy Sharp shooting her.”
    Virgil squatted down, said, “I do have another question for you. I was talking to a guy who said that when you were linebacking, the coach would give you ten dollars every time you took out a starter for the other team.”
    “Not true,” White said, but he smiled into his beer bottle.
    “Then what was it?”
    He looked up at Virgil, and the smile might have been pained. “It was five dollars, and only for running backs, quarterbacks, and receivers.”
    “That’s one of the evilest goddamn things I ever heard of,” Virgil said. “In high school ball? It’s a fuckin’ game, man.”
    “Not in our conference, and not for our coach. If that sonofabitch ever loses a game to Redwood Falls, he’s toast. He’s outa there. He’s gone. But you’re right. It’s evil, and I shouldn’t never have done it. But, you know . . .”
    “What?”
    “I needed the money.”
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL SIGHED and gave up on football. He said, “Listen, Randy. You’re the only witness against Dick Murphy. Murphy may still be in touch with Jimmy. So you’ve got to take care. I’m serious. You stay away from Murphy, and might want to lock your doors at night—or maybe head out for a few days. We know Jimmy’s got himself some hunting rifles.”
    White nodded, and said, “I got this supervisor. Stan. If you could fix it for me to get a couple days off, I could drive up to the Cities. I got a cousin there I can stay with.”
    Virgil said, “I can fix that. It’ll be fixed when you get back.”
    “Okay. Okay.”
    “You have a little thing about Ag Murphy?” Virgil asked.
    “No. Hardly even knew her. Didn’t really know her until she married Dick. That’s when I really got to know her,” he said. He stopped, and Virgil waited, because he wasn’t done. He said, “She was a nice girl. Friendly with everyone. I knew her in high school, and she was always nice to me, and then when, you know, she came back here with Dick, I’d see her around, and she’d always stop to talk. . . .”
    “But there was really nothing there . . .”
    White said, “Ah, Jesus,” and it came out like a sob.

10
    INTERESTING.
    Randy had a thing about Ag Murphy, and Dick Murphy was apparently so ignorant of that fact that he’d tried to recruit Randy to murder her. That was one semi-solid piece. Only semi-solid because Murphy hadn’t actually made the request; it had been
understood
, and juries wouldn’t always buy that. But if Tom McCall had another piece . . .
    As he drove away from White’s truck, Virgil tried McCall’s phone again, and again was shuffled off to Nina Box’s voice mail.
    Where the hell were they? What were they doing? They could be halfway to California, if nobody had been looking for them—but half the nation was looking for them, and there was no way they could have avoided that net.
    Unless they’d killed somebody out on an isolated farmstead somewhere and were driving the victim’s car out across the prairie toward Los Angeles, or down to the Mexican border. . . .
    •   •   •
    THEY WEREN’T DOING any of that; and McCall wasn’t answering the phone because he was too busy.
    Jimmy Sharp had a weird feeling about Tom. Like